Diplomacy Dojo Episode 5: Risk in Diplomacy28 min read

Intro 0:00  

The Diplomacy Dojo is a weekly discussion, led by Your Bored Brother, about Diplomacy tactics and strategies. Let’s listen in on what our players are discussing this week.

BrotherBored 0:12  

My initial thought when I hear about taking risks in Diplomacy is that… I always want to remind players, you got to take risks somewhere if you want to win the match. And it’s a question of determining the moment that it’s time to take a risk and where you’re comfortable taking that risk. So that’s your question: When or when not do you take those risks.

Let’s start from the analysis of getting a solo win. Because how people assess the risk they’re willing to take to get a solo win often depends on how they value a solo win. For example, if you value a solo win as qualitatively superior to any draw, or any draw size, where you’re willing to risk almost anything in order to get that solo win, then you’re a player who’s probably more willing to take risks even right from the beginning; you know, taking an opening move that has huge risk involved, but maybe it makes your ability to get a solo win down the line, you think, higher. 

There are some scoring systems where a solo win is treated much differently, like a Carnage scoring system. So if you’re thinking like that, you might take risks early and often. Whereas, a zero-sum scoring system, where a solo win is not necessarily worth that much more than a draw… Like if you’re doing draw size scoring, a three-way draw, well, a solo win’s worth three times as much as a three-way draw. Or if you’re doing sum of squares, maybe, you know, nearly getting a solo win is worth half as much or even more than half as much as a solo win, so your assessment’s going to be different. 

There’s even more context you can add to it, which is if you’re in a tournament, and you know that you need some kind of result in order to, let’s say, get to the next round of the tournament, then anything less than that is worth zero. When you look at it that way, “Oh, I got 50 points,” yeah, but you needed 51 to get to the next round, so the difference between zero and 50, that’s all the same, there’s no difference. But similarly, if you know for sure that you have the 51 you need to get to the next round, then risking that 51 for anything might be kind of foolish, because hey, why not just clock to the next round and then see what happens? Some players will think like that. 

There are other factors that I would weigh for as well, which is to try to estimate the payoff of a given risk that you’re going to take. I think you alluded to this earlier. “Hmm, well, you know, if I get this right, I might solo win, and if I get this wrong, I lose a Supply Center. Oh, you know, whoop dee doo. That’s not a very big loss.”

And I actually had to learn from my own mistakes, in the 2019 ODC, there was a turn where I could have risked a supply center that I had—I think I was at 16, and there was a chance I would go down to 15, but if I was right, I would go up to 17—And I didn’t appreciate, because I wasn’t that familiar with the sum of square scoring, that because sum of square scoring is exponential, gaining a 17th Supply Center was worth something like twice as much as what I would lose, losing one Supply Center. So if I had been thinking more mathematically or more rationally, I probably would have been willing to take that risk.

Let’s say we’re in a draw size scoring system, where as long as you have one Supply Center, and the match ends in a draw, you’re in. In that situation, if you think that the worst-case outcome is just that you get a setback, but that your ability to get into a draw is about the same as it was before—Like let’s say that you’re a France who’s at eight supply centers, you control all your home centers and Iberia, you could take a big risk to try to expand, maybe, you know, get into… maybe be the board leader or something. And if oh, it doesn’t work, I get set back, retreating into your home centers and Iberia or eventually into Iberia, you’ll probably still get in the draw, so taking a major risk at that point is not a big deal. Whereas, if you were talking about the sum-of-square scoring system, where the number of supply centers that you have matters quite a bit, knowing that you could be rolled back down to a handful of centers, that might be… You might be more risk-averse in that situation.

So we could also get a little more tactical in terms of, “When is it worth taking a risk?” and I’ll explain what I mean. There are moments in a Diplomacy match where I feel very confident that I know what the other players are going to do. Either because like it’s a gunboat game, and I just feel, “Oh yeah, I know how this person thinks. I’m totally in this guy’s head,” and so I’m willing to take a risk that “Oh, yeah, you know if this… if he moves to Silesia, I’m in trouble, but he won’t!” If I feel that way, then maybe I’ll take that risk. And in a press game, even more so, where you can just make a straight credibility determination of what the player is telling you. You say, “Okay, England says he’s going to move to Mid Atlantic Ocean, and I believe this, I believe it. I think that’s going to happen, and so yeah, I’ll take a risk. If England’s lying and moves this other way, I’ll be in big trouble, but I don’t think that.” And so if you have confidence that you know what the other players are going to do, then I think that is a great time to take a risk. They could be lying, and so you might get in trouble, but if you play with the assumption that other players are going to exploit every move you make, or that they’re always going to be lying to you, you’ll never get anywhere. 

I’ll give an example of what might be seen as risk-taking by some people. In a match that I have going on right now. It’s getting towards the end game and one of the players in the end game said, “I am impressed with your press style. It seems like you only lie to somebody, if, when you get away with it, there’s nothing they can do about it afterward.” And I will describe that as a good moment to take a risk; if I’m lying, I’m lying to this player, but if they do what they’re promising, and I abuse their promise, I take advantage of them and do a backstab or something, I do something that’s inconsistent with what I was promising, there’ll be nothing they can do about it. If I’m caught, let’s say they counter me somehow, well, then they were lying to me, too! So what of it? We both lied to each other.

I think that’s an okay time to take a risk. I guess it’s a political or diplomatic risk. You’re slighting somebody. You’ve used your credibility. But if they can’t retaliate, that’s maybe a worthwhile move. 

On defense, if I’m playing draw size scoring then I am usually willing to take enormous risk, to ensure that I can have a chance at getting in a draw, by powering somebody up. I call this strategy “take yourself hostage.” I think that can be really effective. If you control a center like Portugal, Tunis, maybe St. Petersburg or Moscow, something that is that’s really hard to clear out. If the stalemate line runs through that center, if the ultimate stalemate line runs through it, it’s going to be hard to clear you out. So just give, you know, five supply centers to the board leader, something terrifying like that, so that everybody starts trying to defend your position, instead of trying to kick you out of it. That’s a big risk; they might solo win as a result. 

Like let’s say, I’m Austria, it’s a Gunboat game, and Turkey, of course, starts moving towards me right away, and Italy antagonizes me from the first turn, and Russia is not getting any advantages over me, but is trying to see, “Hey, maybe I can get something here,” and it’s going turn after turn, and like… dagnabbit! None of these players seems to have any thoughts on their brains, other than, “How can I get the Austrian centers?” So at some point, I’ll determine, “Okay, you know, none of my signals have worked. Nothing is happening, you know, what, screw it.” And I’ll start… maybe it’s time to run away to Munich and Berlin. And yep, sorry, Germany, your life is ruined, but maybe I can get into a stalemate line there, or I’m just going to throw everything I have to the west and try to survive in the boot somewhere, and power up Turkey or Russia. And yeah, it sucks to be you, Italy, but you were attacking me every turn without exception, so I don’t really feel guilty about this, something like that.

If many turns go by, and it seems like the players are not convinced by what I’m doing, that they should change what they’re doing strategically, then I need to do what I’m doing strategically.

When it comes to taking small tactical risks, if I think a solo win is in the cards for me, like, you know, I’m slightly the board leader. I have the positions, you know, just… I‘m sure you know what I’m talking about. You feel like it seems possible. Then, there are moments where, in in that position, you’re going to have to take huge risks. That’s because, as you’re getting in this position, you probably have somewhere between nine and 12 supply centers. And most people have a rule of thumb that well, I want to have 13 or 14 before I start going for a solo win, and that attitude might serve you well in a low quality match where players don’t understand how to play. At a high level game, the other players will see that coming a mile away, and they’ll do something to defend against it. You’re not going to be able to brute force your way to a solo win. So you got to start thinking a couple turns ahead when you’re more in the nine to 12 range. And that means, when you launch you’re ambitious effort to get a solo win, there’s going to be holes in your defense somewhere,  or there’s going to be raiders behind your line or something. There’s going to be something, because you just don’t have enough units to cover all the parts of the map. And that means making decisions like, “You know what, I’m Germany and if I’m going to win, I just looking at this, I’m going to need Tunis somehow;” and doing something nuts like bypassing Iberia to get fleets into the Mediterranean much earlier. Even though that means you’re going to have to fight a brutal battle against whomever you left behind in Iberia. And you might not win as a result! They might outplay you and survive, but would you have solo won, if you had concentrated everything on getting Iberia? Probably not. You would reach 15 or 16 supply centers and never cross the stalemate line. Or something like that. There are many other scenarios. 

I think it’s worth taking—Or not just worth it, it’s necessary. It is straight necessary to take tactical risks like that, to be able to solo win in a high-level match. And so the quality… Whether you win or not will come down to whether you had chosen correctly where to allocate that risk or something like that.

I am more willing to take risks, if I assess the player with respect to… how do I phrase this? I’m taking a risk that another player might do something. If I assess that player to be a low-quality player, then I’m more willing to take the risk, because I think I can just outplay that player at a later time. They won’t make the right moves, or they may not even perceive that there’s an opportunity here to take advantage of me. And against a high-quality player, I usually play much more conservatively. Simple, methodical, hey, there’s just no way they can take advantage of these moves. There’s almost nothing they could do to backstab me. I’ll play that way.

I think many other players think similarly, which is why… I have a lot of experience playing high-level gunboat games. And in my experience, high level gunboat games can be long, grinding matches, because the players are not willing to go all-in on offense. They always leave some defense behind so that their ally doesn’t feel tempted to backstab them, which means that there’s no overwhelming force on offense, so the match can go on for quite a while without the players making much headway, and it’s kind of like the first player to really, “Okay, I’m going to go all in, I’m going to send everything.” Maybe that player makes a breakthrough, or maybe that player gets stabbed. Haha.

And so in a Press game, if I assess that my ally is pretty canny, I’ll leave some… I’ll play a little more conservatively with respect to that ally. Usually, for me especially, if my ally makes the first move of, like, de-escalating an area or to make like a demilitarized zone… If they make the first move, I think to myself, okay, I either should reciprocate, because they made this gesture, or I just need to attack them while I have this good opportunity, one or the other. But if they’re showing me trust, and I’m continuing to show them skepticism, that’s like the worst of both worlds because I’m not getting the advantage of their trust, but nor am I getting the advantage of backstabbing them.

In terms of understanding and predicting other players’ moves, if I figure out that another player is “squirrelly,” I usually take little risk with respect to them, and sometimes I even try to take them out. Because the problem might be not so much that they’re unpredictable by anyone. It’s just that I am struggling to predict them, and that’s maybe somewhat who I want knocked out of the match because they’re a bigger threat to me.

If I feel like I have a good understanding of how the other player thinks, that makes me want to keep that player around—if they’re friendly, especially if they’re friendly towards me, and especially if there’s no reason for them to know that I know how they play because that means in the end game, I’ll be able to exploit them, and they might not see that coming.

Okay, I feel like we covered this topic.

That reminds me of another kind of risk that I’ve thought about, which is when playing for a draw, my risk assessment sometimes is, I become very conservative. And if I look at the board and say, “Ah, yes, if my defending side simply plays correctly, we will guarantee a draw. There’s no guesswork. If we just execute the moves correctly, we will draw,” then I have a very low tolerance for any risk, since I see a very clear path to end the game. And in a Gunboat game, for example, if there’s a player who seems kind of unreliable, and I see the game headed in the direction of a draw, where I’ll be the one trying to set up the draw, I’ll try to take that player out, even if it means a lot of risk. Because I think, “if this player is around, when we have to form the draw, they’ll blow it, they’ll just blow it somehow. I assess this player as not understanding what it takes to form a stalemate line in gunboat diplomacy, therefore, I lose, if this player is left alive in the match. Therefore, I’m risking very little by by throwing everything I have at taking this player out.”

I learned this from a couple of high level gunboat diplomacy players, and I’ve seen this in many matches. And I do this as well, where I assess, okay, I have to draw with somebody… Let’s say I’m Turkey, and Austria and Italy are both somewhat viable, and either one could take out the other and I could help. I got to think, am I going to have to play for a draw with both of these guys, because they both know how to defend themselves? And we’ll just lose? Or, you know what, maybe Austria seems like he’s got no idea what he’s doing… I’ll change course. I’m going to start helping Italy in every way. I don’t need the center myself; I’ll just—whatever it takes to get this Austrian knocked out of the match, so that we have a surefire way to set up a stalemate line.

If you think you’re on a path to a solo win, then the sensible players are the ones you want to take out and keep around the players who are naïve, or whatever. There are some flaws in how they’re approaching the game. Those are players you want to keep, because they’ll facilitate your win. 

If a player shows something that’s a blunder, I’d say, usually, that turns out to be accurate. This requires a lot of metagame analysis, but I think you’ll understand what I’m saying. In Gunboat Diplomacy, there’s a temptation to go after a weak player so that you can gobble up their centers and get stronger. There’s a big incentive to take out whoever seems weak, and the players will sometimes even “smell blood.” If you get off to a bad opening, like let’s say you’re Austria, and Italy attacks you early, even if the Russian player wasn’t really thinking about going after Austria, they’re like, “Oh, it’s my chance. This is my one chance to capture some centers!” They go nuts, and they try to take out Austria, that kind of stuff can happen. And so because of that, to counter the phenomenon of “sharks smelling blood,” many Gunboat players begin with a really strong defensive opening that’s hard to exploit. And so if a player makes an opening that’s not very good, like it really doesn’t make sense or leaves them open to attack, I usually assess them as being very naïve, or like maybe this is their first Gunboat game, or they’re inferring stuff from Press Diplomacy that doesn’t apply to Gunboat, but something. Something’s really not right with this player, and that usually turns out to be correct, because experienced players are unwilling to do stuff like that. 

I will say a caveat, which is that in some high-level Gunboat games, I have seen players do moves—very good players—do moves that are not per se blunders, but they’re kind of weird. They’re not consistent with the metagame you would expect from high-level players, and their goal there is sometimes to throw you off the scent that they might be good. 

So I think your example is touching on a kind of risk we hadn’t discussed yet, but it is very germane to this conversation, which is, how do you assess your capabilities relative to the other players? In most games, not just Diplomacy, but in any game, if you consider yourself to be very strong compared to your opponents, you likely want to take a low risk strategy where you think, “Yeah, as long as my fundamentals are good, and I know they are, then I will probably win; because I can depend on the other players to make mistakes. I’ll just defeat them with my fundamentals so I don’t need to take big risks.” Whereas, if you assess, “Oh man, I got into a game with some guys that are much better than me. Thanks for letting me play, guys.” In that situation, it may be time to take huge risks because if you just play a conservative game or a predictable game and rely on your fundamentals, you’ll lose that. They will beat you that way. So by taking, like—maybe I’ll get lucky, you know, maybe something. And if I do something that’s unexpected, or take them out of their comfort zone, then their experience won’t be able to help them, then it might be time to take big risks.

And so there’s a similar thing going on with what you were saying, with an experienced player going up against other experienced players to do moves that are maybe… theoretically, the moves are not as good, but because the players will have less experience dealing with those moves, maybe you’re going to get a psychological edge. In one v one diplomacy, I think about that a lot. If I’m playing against somebody who’s got some familiarity with how the grind works, let’s say in France versus Austria, that might be time for me to try some kind of wild strategy as Austria, like, I’m going to take St. Petersburg as fast as possible and try to concentrate on Scandinavia… That’s not a very good strategy. I’ll be honest, that’s not the best strategy, in one v one for Austria. But the French player does not need to make very precise responses in order to counter that strategy. And if they don’t notice what you’re doing, or they don’t know what those precise responses are, then you’ll win just from the fact that you did something that they’re not used to seeing. That won’t work against an expert player. 

You might have heard this; I am reluctant even uttering the word because I hate this idiom… the term “a cheese strategy.” So to me, a “cheese” strategy means, and—ugh—it’s disgusting to me even to say this phrase… But to me, what that means is, a strategy that only works if your opponent doesn’t know what it is and doesn’t see it coming. But if that’s the situation that you’re in, you’re playing against someone who doesn’t know what that strategy is, and doesn’t see it coming, and then it’ll win for sure. It wins for sure against people who don’t understand it. But I think there are some things you can do that kind of go in that direction. That there are some ways…. There are some strategies you can play with diplomacy that the other player, if they’ve never seen it before, you know, they might fall for it. 

Let’s make a comparison to, like Lepanto, which is not a cheese strategy, it is a standard tool in the Italian strategic toolkit. But if the Turkish player has never played, they’ve never seen that before, they could fall for it and be crushed.  I know an example of an opening strategy that I consider to be ridiculous, but if it works, can pay off. Have you ever heard of the “Centrifuge” opening for Germany? The opening is Berlin to Prussia, Munich to Kiel, and Kiel to Baltic. And the reason why this is a ridiculous strategy, and why I’m calling it a cheese strategy or whatever, is that the more conventional German openings, of opening with Kiel to either Denmark or Holland, guarantees that Germany is going to be able to make a neutral capture and most likely two; because most English players aren’t willing to forego their own capture just to stop Germany from getting one. And then it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to get these two captures for sure, and then it’s just a question of what happens with my, you know, vis-a-vis Belgium, and like do I bounce Russia out of Sweden or something like that?” And it’s solid, and most games where Germany wins begin like that, to put it mildly. 

But the “centrifuge” opening is this idea that Germany begins by moving the army to Prussia and not to Silesia, which is normally the more, like… even if you were going to attack Russia, you might do that or something. Germany is going to convoy into Denmark. And the point of playing this way is to set up for a supported attack on Sweden, or possibly to move your fleet at Baltic into Gulf of Bothnia, and hope to just outguess Russia and get in there. What you’re ultimately trying to achieve is a situation where, as Germany, you have a fleet and Baltic and a fleet in Gulf of Bothnia, and you’ve captured Denmark and Sweden, but with armies. And the logic here is that you’re going to crush Russia early, and then whip around through St. Petersburg and Norway to attack England. England won’t see this coming because you never sent the fleets in that direction, etc. And this is not a good, this is… Please, please don’t do this. Nobody in the world do this opening for Gunboat Diplomacy, because leaving your whole western front unguarded against the two far more powerful gunboat powers of France and England to take down Russia right away… Like, even if it works, this isn’t that great of a plan. And most of the time, England and/or France are just going to come after you while they can. But if you pull it off, wiping out Russia first does—if you somehow wipe out Russia and then go after France and England, you can take them both on. You are like a turbocharged Germany. In Press Diplomacy, that’s not a bad strategy sometimes, but in Gunboat,  I don’t think it’s very wise. I almost—I guess I should say “anything goes” in Press Diplomacy, like you can make anything work, in my opinion. 

So I think that where I’m willing to start taking risks in a Gunboat Diplomacy game is usually after 1901. Like in 1901, I played very methodically, I make the same openings—even like what I assessed to be “the best opening,” I usually make that opening. I mean, gosh, the game just started! You know, do I want to risk so much right at the start? When if I play conservatively, there’s plenty of time for the situation to develop, and for me to get opportunities, is usually how I see it.

One exception I’ll make is that as Austria, I invariably make the Balkan Gambit opening, which does risk Italy attacking. And my logic there is, if Italy is willing to attack me in 1901, there’s no way I’m winning this game anyway.

Let me add this: when I am Italy, I am unwilling to take… I’m typically unwilling to take offensive risk by attacking Austria, and this is something that is an interesting concept. I’m Italy in Gunboat Diplomacy; I view attacking Austria as a risk. And the reason why this is a risk is that if Turkey ends up turbocharged as a result of my attack, I’m going to lose; and even if I win, Turkey can probably fight me to a draw, because Turkey has a corner. And if anybody in the west gets strong, I’m not going to grind down Turkey faster than they’re going to take over the whole northern part of the map. So, some players, I think they don’t necessarily perceive that attacking Austria immediately as Italy entails all this strategic risk, even though you might get a tactical gain out of it. And here’s why I view it as so risky: in a Gunboat game, I have no idea what are the capabilities of the other players, their skill levels, their intentions, I don’t have any read on them at the beginning of the game. I need several turns of information of seeing how they move before I can assess how they play. 

And I view, as Italy, one of my my core strengths as Italy is that I have the opportunity to wait a year, really several years. Italy could go three or four years without attacking anybody with no problem, no ultimate consequences because Italy didn’t make early gains. That’s not a big deal. And I view that as a big advantage, because it means that I have lots of time to assess the board and where I need to go and who I should attack. Now I see, “Okay, well, Turkey attacked Russia right away and Russia’s putting up a spirited defense. Austria seems kind of like a fool, alright, I’ll go after Austria.” And that’s… to me that’s much less risky, because I’m making that decision based on information that I know, that I’ve learned from watching the game unfold.

I think that the lesson here that I draw is that, the further you get into the match, the more appropriate it may be to take risks because you have much more information, and you can assess the risks more accurately. Whereas, making big gambles really early in the game, I personally don’t think that’s the way to go, because what you don’t know what the risk is that you’re taking, or the chances of it working. 

There are players who feel differently, especially with Press Diplomacy. People that like are like, no, I negotiate my entire alliance in 1901, before any moves, and then I go all-in on that. That can work. It’s not for me. I have done it a few times. Once I played Key Lepanto as Austria, and it worked out. But I think that I was willing to do that because I was not a very good player back then. I didn’t really understand what I was getting into.

Another way you could phrase that is, there are some people who are risk seekers, that they just enjoy risk-taking, even if it’s not necessarily beneficial. “This is an excessive amount of risk, I mean, you’re risking everything in return for something rather small.” But some people, they enjoy that approach to games in general. This is the kind of person who I imagine would really enjoy coming to a casino, you know, for fun. Because in a casino, you know for sure that it’s a bad bet, but nevertheless, people have fun. People have fun even though they know it’s a bad bet. That kind of person, the risk seeker—I guess they place a premium actually on risk, because it adds to their fun. That ain’t me. I do not have fun in a casino. I’ve been a few times in my life and I usually just want to leave. 

I think there are two ways that one can misjudge a risk situation, or at least two ways. One is to miss-assess the risk itself, and the other is to have reads that are off. And you can play a game where you make really obvious tactical choices turn after turn, in order to deliberately mislead players into thinking that you’re very methodical, and you don’t take huge risks, so that way, when the time comes to take a huge risk, it’s very likely to work. 

Well, you were right, Paul, that you’re the topic that you brought was wide and deep enough for us to talk about it the entire time. Thanks for coming, see you around.

Outro 32:42  

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